I told my ethics students that one of the goals of the class was to make it harder for them to go grocery shopping (or car shopping or pet shopping or spouse shopping and so on). Being an ethicist--especially one trained in narrative theology--just plain makes it harder to get stuff done, sometimes.
The "narrative theology" part makes it especially hard to just pick up any old kids' book and read it to my poor, long-suffering children.
I infected my students with that bit of insanity this morning--I had them read a few children's books to each other and talk about what a person or community formed by that book my believe or practice or understand. (I'm grateful to Vigen Guroian for having written on this topic a few years ago.)
I've done this exercise a few times, and the thing that struck me most this time around was the way books don't always do what they purport to do.
For example, we were all a little put off by Hooper Humperdink...? Not Him!, which was supposed to be a fun romp through the alphabet, wrapped in a tidy narrative of inclusion. The narrator spends the entire book building a fabulous party, while throwing out little asides about not inviting Hooper Humperdink, because he just doesn't like him.
Of course, it's a kids' book, so, in the end, the narrator decides to invite him after all.
Well, you know, that's real sweet and all, but after thirty-two pages of sneering at him, that sort of grudging permission is hardly inclusion. When I asked my students what children might learn, morally, from this book, one of them rightly suggested that this book gives a child permission to dislike other children, so long as they throw them a few token invitations to participate in special activities.
I think there might be some wisdom in giving children permission to talk about their dislikes of other children--it's a natural enough phenomenon, and the solution (corralling and contravening one's own emotions) is a little unnatural and probably needs some verbal processing.
But that is not the delicate dance that Hooper Humperdink performs.
Richard Scarry, without bothering to wrap his silly story in a tidy moral, actually does a much better job of introducing children to the notion of inclusion.
His Firefighters' Busy Day is, like all his books, simply a silly story from start to finish. The four firefighters never seem to manage to get to eat, because every time they sit down to try, the alarm rings and they have to tend to another not-terribly-urgent emergency. The needy-person-in-distress is always Mr. Frumble, a hapless cat who can't seem to manage his pickle car, or anything else.
Where it gets interesting--far more interesting than Hooper's little morality tale, for all that Scarry is completely uninterested in being morally interesting--is when the firefighters figure out that Mr. Frumble is Busytown's most annoying citizen. What do they do? "So that they can finally have a quiet moment to eat, the firefighters invite Mr. Frumble to have dinner with them at the firehouse."
And they prepare him (and themselves) a meal, while keeping him safe there at the firehouse.
I always tell my students that they should run toward their problems (like, a professor whose class they've been cutting or for whom they haven't turned in a bucketload of work), not away from them. Richard Scarry is telling them to grab their problems and bring them home for dinner.
Now, Scarry keeps it from being a tidy morality play by having the alarm ring once again, just as they were sitting down to dinner with Mr. Frumble . . . and they all leave, wishing Mr. Frumble a good dinner on their way out.
Am I reading too much into this silly story by suggesting that a community formed by this story might just have better resources for dealing with difficult people than a community formed by the Hooper Humperdink story?
Perhaps. But guess which one I'm going to be reading to my boys way more often than the other?
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